Spirit Super

Email Deliverability: 23 Billion Dollar Super Fund Case Study
Intro

Are you looking for a way to boost your email deliverability?

Email deliverability is the ability to deliver the emails to the right inboxes! But how exactly do we make sure it happens?

Okay so, the first thing that you have to do is to check your engagement. More specifically, to look into both the technical and social aspects of engagement.

But if it’s your first time or you have done it previously but have not reached your targeted results, this is an article for you. Here I will let you know how to make your email deliverability successful by sharing how I recently helped one of my clients.

Here it goes!

The client is a super fund in Tasmania, worth $23 billion dollars. They came to us because they were facing issues delivering their emails to their 380,000 members.

In order to be compliant, per law, they must provide annual statements to all their customers.

We had a few challenges including new IP addresses and domains created during the recent merger along with a blacklisted domain and low open rate.

The first thing that we have identified from the technical side is that they had problems with their IP reputation. To put it simply, they have been blacklisted! So, we needed to assist them to be removed from the blacklist, however, we needed to make sure that we solved all the other pending issues before removing them from the blacklist avoiding them from getting listed again..

We found too that they had very engaging content and positive open rates before the merger on the social side, which was great, however, we noticed the problem arose when the two companies merged because they had different IP addresses and domains.

The members were receiving emails from this “new business”, but they weren’t familiar yet with the new name – post-merger. So this was part of the problem and by educating the members about the new brand, we manage to overcome this challenge.

In a nutshell, here are the email delivery techniques that we used:

Implementing DNS records

SPF will prevent all platforms, domains, and IP addresses alike from sending emails on your behalf. For example, if a business didn’t have the SPF correctly, I could pretend I’m the business owner and send that email to you and try to sell you anything using a fake link. It is why SPF is very important and needs to be set up appropriately. While DKIM is a certificate similar to SSL, that ensures that the mail sent was also received. And DMARC is what glues SPF and DKIM together, ensuring they’re both working correctly.

Engagement Tracking

A lot of businesses implement a lot of things to make sure their emails are being delivered. But if you’re not tracking engagement, you will encounter email deliverability problems in just a matter of time. You can track engagement by tracking open rate, click rate, site visits or sales!

The segmentation

Segment the people that are inactive from those that are active. Active subscribers are the ones that will likely buy from you. But if you have been sending emails for a very long period of time and the lead hasn’t opened the email or done anything, it means that they’re not interested. And if you continue sending emails to those leads, you will encounter problems. It is why you need to segment your leads by engagement. Inactive leads should be unsubscribed after 90 days or so.

List Cleanup

Not all subscribers are legitimate ones. Instead, it might be a fake or a bounced email. It means that any mail you’re going to send to this contact would bounce right back because it’s invalid or the mailbox is full. And if you keep sending emails to them, Gmails or Yahoos will recognize that these inboxes don’t exist and they’ll assume that you are spamming the owner of those emails, and they will get your domain reputation flagged and you might end up in a blacklist, unable to send emails.

Another thing is a spam trap. A spam trap is an email that will only be used for one particular list and assigned to a particular domain. And if any other IP addresses or domains use this list, it will trigger, and then you get penalized. In other words, make sure that you acquire your subscribers from inner advertising and organic traffic and don’t go and purchase lists because it’s not worth it and is a quick way to damage your domain reputation.

Feedback Loop

We use Google postmaster to get the information about who’s reporting spam and so on. For example, if someone reports that you have sent an email and didn’t like it, they will spam you. And you’ll want to know them because you don’t want to send emails to that person anymore. After all, if you continue to do so, you will get in trouble, and your domain will be penalized.

Unsubscribe

You need to make sure that it’s easy for people to unsubscribe from your emails. The thing is, it’s better for a contact to unsubscribe from your email list instead of them reporting your emails as spam. If they report your emails as spam, it will directly impact your email deliverability.

Also, when we first started warming up the IP, we got up to a 54% open rate, which is great. And that’s 100,000 emails. And then when we finished, we got 383,000 customers that received the mail and out of that 37% opened, which is fantastic.

Overall, it helps if you are proactive with the technical and social aspects of email deliverability. Always aim for engagement, use automation to provide a personalized journey where they will get the right message at the right time delivered to the right audience, and it’s super important to segment your audience too, so you are sending emails to the contacts that are engaging and unsubscribing the contacts that are not (after 90 days or so).

Similarly, make sure you nurture your leads, that they are engaging, know who you are, and trust and like you, because this is the easiest way to sell and continue to sell to them using email marketing.

Follow-ups are key. Why? Because if I am selling you something and I only talked to you once, there’s a very good chance that you’re going to forget about me. But if you have follow-ups and you can automate those, people are more likely to buy from you and you will always be kept in the back of their mind,

Make sure that you use Facebook ads, SMS emails and ringless voicemails in addition to your email outreach. For my customers, we use ActiveCampaign to orchestrate the entire email marketing and get their audience reached by a multitude of channels in a coordinated manner.

Again, engagement is the key if you want to have a healthy email list that generates sales!

Let me know if you have any questions or if you need any help.

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